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This paper examines the spatial and temporal dimensions of varied schooling agendas for poor and oppressed caste children and adults in the princely state of Travancore in nineteenth-century colonial south India. Schools became socially contested and politically charged spaces in which various subaltern castes, particularly the Dalits and Nadars, articulated a new language of social and religious self-fashioning. British Protestant missionaries played a crucial role in provoking these imaginations and yet, the joint workings of caste and racial prejudices resulted in ambivalent cultural encounters in the educational landscape. Caste was central to these contestations and negotiations in making modern child subjectivities and tended to produce new forms of inequality and reproduce existing ones. I argue that schooling campaigns for the poor resulted in the perpetuation of hierarchised, caste-inflected norms of childhood and produced multiple marginal children in local society. This paper draws upon British Protestant missionary archives to highlight the unstable and violent geographies in which children of subaltern castes navigated the sphere of modern schooling in colonial Travancore and the constitutive function of schools in the making of marginal childhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A translation of the named article by the early Soviet Indologist A. P. Barannikov (1890–1952) is introduced. The topicality of the article in relation to current trends in scholarship is discussed, and a brief consideration of the historical context of the publication of the original article is provided. This includes reflections on the specificities of pre-Revolutionary Indology in Russia, especially as represented in the work of S. F. Ol'denburg (1863–1934) and F. I. Shcherbatskoi (aka Theodor Stcherbatsky, 1866–1942), and the development of a new form of Indology as represented by the translated article. Information is provided about the intellectual sources of the article, highlighting the development of sociological approaches to language in the early USSR, and comparisons with the ideas of Antonio Gramsci. It is suggested that Barannikov's work, with its discussion of the centrality of conflictual relations between Sanskrit and vernacular traditions, anticipates some recent works on the anti-caste movement, and it suggests a more complex relationship between colonial philology and oriental studies more generally, and the intellectual traditions of the indigenous elite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Lihāf' by Ismat Chughtai is widely read as a tale of feminist and queer rebellion but it also narrates a complex account of a young girl's initiation into sexuality as a result of her molestation by a much older woman. In this narratological study that also draws upon the historical context of the Urdu world of letters which framed Chughtai's own self-fashioning as a writer and intellectual, I argue that the case for a feminist and queer-positive reading of 'Lihāf' often misses or downplays the sexual molestation of the narrator as a child and remains inattentive to the ways in which Chughtai constructs conflict and tension between the two voices that narrate the story: that of the adult narrator, a Muslim woman, who opens the tale and then, deploying the voice and perspective of a child, recalls and reconstructs the memory of the fateful events of her childhood. Central to my reading is the point of view of the child whose movement in and through the female-dominated zenānā re-presents the case for viewing 'a women's utopia' in dystopic ways. By splitting the female perspective into two overlapping realms – those of the adult and the child – Chughtai rewrites desire as experienced by the 'New Woman,' a historical figure of feminist emancipation often identified in established literary and critical readings with Begum Jān. Such an identification, I argue, is, in fact, unidimensional and is trenchantly undermined in the story by the brutal and intersecting logic of patriarchal domination and class exploitation, a logic at whose fulcrum is the figure of the child as the dark Other of the New Woman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]